The Mobile Makerspace is making sure Calcasieu Parish students have access to STEM education all summer long.

The Calcasieu Parish School Board Mobile Makerspace Bus is a repurposed school bus that has been retrofitted with lab space to bring STEM education directly to students. The bus is decked out with technology and resources used to introduce students to high-tech tools and foundational STEM skills.

The Mobile Makerspace made a stop at the Donald Ray Stevens Community Center on Monday morning. This stop was the third in a series of stops the Makerspace is making this summer in collaboration with EPIC Adventures by the city of Lake Charles Recreation and Parks Department, an eight-week summer camp hosted by the city.

Each week, EPIC Adventures presents campers with a new theme, and this week’s theme is “Party in the USA.” The activity in the Makerspace is tailored to this theme, said Technology Facilitator Meredith Boullion.

On Monday, students were tasked to direct a KaiBot — a small coding robot that uses Blockly or Python coding — to different landmarks in the United States with cards that represent blocks of code. This is a form of offline coding, which doesn’t require technology like an iPad or computer.

By solidifying their understanding of the pre-coding skills through tactile engagement, the students become more equipped to understand more advanced coding techniques and languages.

“If you were to do block coding, the block is just like a sentence in a language. The cards represent the block coding, so they understand sequencing,” she explained. “They understand the process of coding devices — loops, conditionals, all the things that they need. The language is built into the cards.”

The Mobile Makerspace was created last year after five years of planning by Calcasieu Parish School Board Chief Technology Officer Kim Leblanc with the goal to enhance teachers’ curriculum with hands-on, tech-integrated lessons.

“Connecting to the curriculum is key,” Bouillon said.

Teachers can request a bus visit or plan field trips to the technology labs for Makerspace experiences that are customized to their lesson plans, which are often already integrated with technology skills. The Makerspace provides additional support that prompts coding, critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills, she said.

The Makerspace is mobile and available to every grade level to increase students’ accessibility to technology education, because coding is a skillset that is becoming more and more necessary. Coding became a language recognized by the Louisiana Department of Education in 2022, and as artificial intelligence (AI) integrates into daily life, students must gain a fundamental understanding of coding, she said.

The dynamic hands-on STEM activities engage the students, and the facilitators on the Mobile Makerspace are no strangers to a lightbulb moment.

“Ultimately, if you walked around right now, there’d be a couple kids who just get it and they just run with it. And it’s so exciting to us because we see it,” she said. “It’s a spark that’s lit, and that’s really what we wanted to do. We wanted to light the spark.”

Gillis Extended Day and Dolby Extended Day were visited earlier this month, and the Makerspace will stop by the Henry Heights Community Center on Thursday, July 3.

It will also be at Vinton Middle STEM Camp on July 22 and E.K. Key Extended Day on July 24.